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Czech
Czech is the official language of the Czech Republic. There are approximately 12 million native speakers. Phonology Like Slovak, stress in Czech is fixed on the first syllable of words. Vowels can be long or short. Therefore, 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' and 'u' each have a lengthened counterpart. There is a distinction between 'soft' and 'hard' consonants. In turn, this distinction is important not only in pronunication but grammar as well. e.g. Mám cizí knihu = I have a foreign book ('cizí' is 'soft', and the accusative feminine form of 'cizí' is identical to the nominative form among others) vs. Mám zelenou knihu = I have a green book.('zelená' is 'hard' and the accusative feminine form of 'zelená' is 'zelenou') In spite of this, Czech pronunciation is rather simple despite the intimidating appearance to those unaccustomed to acute accents, hooks, open dots, ů and a few consonants that act like vowels (e.g. prst = finger - pronounced something like English 'perst' but the 'er' sound is quite short. Think of the English word 'bird', it's pronounced like 'brd' rather than 'beerd') Grammar Like other Slavonic languages, Czech has elaborate inflections for its nouns and adjectives. For nouns and adjectives, there are seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental and vocative There are three numbers: singular, dual and plural. However, the dual is present only in a few instances of declension. In other words, there is neither a complete nominal and adjectival declension in the dual nor dual personal pronouns (e.g. 'we two', 'you two') as in Slovenian and Sorbian. There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter with the masculine divided further into animate and inanimate categories in the declensions of the nominative and accusative. There are''' four moods': infinitive, indicative, conditional and imperative. There are '''two voices': active and passive. Because of Czech's inflective nature,' personal pronouns are usually omitted' unless the speaker wishes to emphasize the subject of a sentence. In addition,' syntax can be rather free' compared to English as much of the relevant grammatical information of a sentence is revealed in the inflections, suffixes and prefixes of the words. Syntax usually depends on the focus or nuance that a speaker wishes to convey. There are a few rules regarding syntax however. i) the reflexive pronoun goes in the second position except when used in the past tense Češu se doma = I comb myself at home (in general, as part of a routine) Já se doma češu = I comb myself at home (emphasizing the fact that it is *I* who *DOES* comb himself regularly at home) ii) the personal marker of the past tense always goes in the second position Česal jsem se doma = I was combing myself at home (in general, as part of a routine) Já jsem se česával doma = I was combing myself at home (emphasizing the fact that it was *I* who was combing himself at home and the regularity of the combing) iii) adjectives often precede the nouns that they describe (adjectives can follow the nouns that they describe as seen in certain terms used in the physical sciences or in poetic texts). In addition, adjectives must agree with the nouns that they describe. český voják = Czech soldier (masculine animate nominative singular) velký sešit = big notebook (masculine inanimate nominative singular) česká dívka = Czech girl (feminine nominative singular) červené auto = red car (neuter nominative singular) čeští vojáci = Czech soldiers (masculine animate nominative plural) velké sešity = big notebooks (masculine inanimate nominative plural) české dívky = Czech girls (feminine nominative plural) červená auta = red cars (neuter nominative plural) Orthography Spelling is quite phonetic. There is devoicing when a voiced consonant (one with a slight 'buzz') is at the end of a word or is immediately before a devoiced consonant (one without a slight 'buzz') This devoicing is not reflected in spelling. E.g. hezký = nice (pronounced 'heski' since voiced 'z' precedes unvoiced 'k'. Therefore, the 'z' sound turns into the 's' sound) E.g. lev = lion (pronounced 'lef' since voiced 'v' is at the end of the word. Therefore, the 'v' sound turns into the 'f' sound) Czech uses the Roman alphabet with its own twists for English speakers. The different letters for English speakers are: á, č, ď, é, ě, í, ň, ó, ř, š, ť, ú, ů, ý, ž Letters with "čárka" (á, é, í, ó, ú/ů, ý) represent added length to the vowel. "Háček" (č, ď, ě, ň, ř, š, ž) represents softer pronunciation and therefore different sound. Common difficulties The Foreign Service Institute has classified Czech as a "Hard" language. It is estimated that learning Czech to a Professional Working Proficiency in the language (a score of Speaking-3/Reading-3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale) will take an average of 44 weeks (1100 class hours).U.S. Department of State; FSI's Experience with Language Learning; https://www.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/c78549.htm For English speakers, some of the common difficulties are: # verbal aspect # verbs of motion # syntax # nominal and adjectival declension # vocabulary # pronunciation of certain sounds, such as "ř" # pronunciation of certain words, especially those with clustered consonants ("Strč prst skrz krk.") Resources Books 1)' Teach Yourself Czech' (David Short) * It comes with two CDs or cassettes and a textbook. * What I enjoyed most about this course was that it had lively dialogues and useful grammar information. It also comes with exercises for each chapter with answers at the back of the book. It also has a chapter that touches on the differences between formal and colloquial Czech. - What I enjoyed least about this course was that its presentation of grammar was somewhat unstructured and could intimidate the learner at first. In the interest of keeping lively dialogues, it's natural that the language used would have relatively complex structures for a beginner and some idioms. The grammar section of each chapter would focus on the grammatical aspects of each set of dialogues. It would have been desirable if the textbook had included more exercises. 2) Colloquial Czech (James Naughton) * It comes with two CDs or cassettes and a textbook. * What I enjoyed about this course was that it had good dialogues (perhaps not as lively as those used in Pontifex's course) and useful grammar information. It also comes with exercises for each chapter with answers at the back of the book. It also devotes a chapter each to formal and colloquial Czech respectively. * Compared to Short's course, 'Colloquial Czech' has a somewhat better presentation of grammar since the dialogues are designed in a way to emphasize the grammar or theme of a given chapter. It would have been desirable if the textbook had included more exercises. As a first step, Colloquial Czech would probably be a slightly better starting point for the absolute beginner because of its better presentation. 3) FSI Czech FAST course '''(textbook by Radovan Pletka) * It comes with twelve CDs or cassettes and a textbook/workbook. * What I enjoyed about this course was that it had practical dialogues and succinct grammar information. It also comes with exercises for each chapter. Most of the exercises are oral and consist of repeating what the speaker says. There are some exercises where you fill in the blanks while listening to the dialogues. - Compared to Short's and Naughton's courses, the FAST course is quite dry and more utilitarian. However, if you want a course with the most audio, this is the probably the best that you can get. Even though the FAST course's introduction mentions that it is meant for people who need a crash course in Czech and cannot get access to the full FSI basic Czech course (44 weeks), I have never been able to find this full Czech course. 4) '''A Practical Czech Course For English Speaking Students (Miloš Sova) * It is a textbook with 48 chapters (530 pages - including appendices with excerpts from Czech novels and outline of grammar.) * What I enjoyed most about this course was that it has lots of exercises and that it builds your knowledge gradually. In addition, it's full of useful grammatical information, albeit it notes that some of the constructions that it illustrates and explains are rarely used in colloquial Czech. It focuses on providing a good understanding of formal Czech rather than colloquial Czech. * Compared to more modern textbooks, Sova's textbook is old (published in 1962) and full of outdated dialogues (e.g. it still talks of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, some of the assigned texts are subtle boosts of socialism/communism.). More importantly for someone learning on his or her own, the textbook has no answer key (apparently there is a separate book with answers to all of the exercises, but I haven't found it yet). It's better to use it in a classroom setting since some of the exercises are oral and you will need a teacher or fellow student to help you with exercises where you create your own dialogues. * As of September 2011, Indiana University's Center for Language Technology and Instructional Enrichment hosts the recordings in .mp3 of the book's dialogues and readings on its audio archive for Czech under "A Practical Czech Course". 5) English-Czech/Czech-English Dictionary (Josef Fronek) (Published by Leda) * This is a larger and better overall two-way dictionary than Poldauf et al.'s version. In Fronek's dictionary, most entries contain commonly-used translations of phrasal verbs between English and Czech complete with the appropriate grammatical cases. It also indicates whether a verb is perfective or imperfective. As a bonus, it also has grammatical tables illustrating the nominal and adjectival declensions and verb conjugations. Almost all entries are linked to a pattern in the section with grammatical tables. * This dictionary would be the undisputed master among medium-sized English-Czech-English dictionaries if it weren't for one serious flaw. Namely, it rarely indicates the perfective-imperfective pairs for the verbal entries. For example it's useful that the dictionary indicates 'napsat' as a perfective verb meaning 'to write'. However, the dictionary does not mention that its imperfective counterpart is 'psat'. As such, a learner will have a problem in finding the correct verb to use in a sentence. * Avoid foreign booksellers or Amazon if possible as they usually charge a substantial premium on this dictionary (in North America, this dictionary costs about $55 US). Try instead to buy the dictionary in Czech Republic or Slovakia. In Czech Republic, this dictionary costs approximately 800 Czech crowns (roughly $33 US). 6) English-Czech/Czech-English Dictionary '''(Ivan Poldauf et al.) (10th ed. published by WD Publications or Hippocrene Books) * Compared to the dictionary by Fronek, Poldauf et al.'s offering isn't the best overall one. It doesn't show as many examples of idioms in the entries and some of the English translations are a little unusual. However, it has one redeeming feature that makes it worthwhile. Poldauf et al.'s Czech-English section shows the imperfective-perfective pair of verbs in the same entry. This is an invaluable aid for English-speaking learners who have no idea which version of the verb to use. If the compilers didn't include this piece of information in the entries, the learner would on average have a 50% probability of choosing the incorrect verb for use in a sentence. 7) '''Velký česko-anglický slovník (ed. Ivan Poldauf et al.) * This is a larger version of the Czech-English section in the bi-directional English-Czech/Czech-English dictionary in 6) and has the same strengths and weaknesses in 6) * Because it indicates explicitly the aspectual counterpart of every verb, its usefulness to a student is not to be dismissed. * Avoid foreign booksellers or Amazon if possible as they usually charge a substantial premium on this dictionary (in North America, this dictionary costs roughly $37 US). Try instead to buy the dictionary in Czech Republic or Slovakia. In Czech Republic, this dictionary costs approximately 600 Czech crowns (roughly $25 US). 8) Anglicko-český a česko-anglický příruční slovník (Josef Fronek) * This is a very new dictionary containing roughly 50,000 headwords with 90,000 words and phrases. * In general it is similar to Fronek's dictionary in 5) but is somewhat smaller. However this dictionary is really designed for foreigners in mind and in my view is a much better choice for the student of Czech. Each entry in the Czech-English section is listed with inflectional hints including the aspectual counterpart for verbs. In other words the dictionary will clearly show the perfective counterpart of an imperfective verb (or vice-versa) for headwords that are verbs. * If one cannot find Fronek's new concise dictionary (no. 8) then the second-best solution that I have found is to use Fronek's older dictionary for most situations (no. 5) in this list but then turn to one of Poldauf et al.'s dictionaries (nos. 6 or 7) when trying to determine the aspectual counterpart of a verb. Audio Courses Pimsleur offers a course in Czech. Other Forums * Unilang's Czech discussion * WordReference's Czech discussion General collection of links * Ajoda's Czech links * A wide-ranging site on many aspects of the language (e.g. grammar, education, professional organizations, media) General treatment and descriptions of Czech's learning difficulty * A basic profile of Czech (the source of about half of this profile's material): * Sketch of Czech * A website on language difficulty for native speakers of English Dictionaries and other databases * Free online dictionary between Czech and several languages * Dictionary on portal seznam.cz (English, French, German Spanish, Italian) * Dictionary on Lingea.cz (26 languages, including Swedish, Turkish, Polish and others) * Dictionary of Moravian dialects Online courses/textbooks, instructional online videos or lists of available course titles * The king of all sites for those who want to learn Czech independently. It has lots of information, exercises, articles, reviews on learning materials. * List of learning materials of Czech for foreigners with bibliographical information and short reviews * Foreign Service Institute Czech Basic Course hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * DLI Czech Basic Course hosted at ERIC (textbook only - warning large download! 1720 pgs, 99 MB) * DLI Czech Basic Course: Pattern Drills Vol. 1 hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * DLI Czech Basic Course: Verb List hosted at ERIC * DLI Czech Basic Course: Grammar Vol. 1 hosted at ERIC * DLI Czech Basic Course: Grammar Vol. 2 hosted at ERIC * DLI Czech Basic Course: Advanced Phase (Air Phase) hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * DLI Czech Basic Course: Air Force Dialogues hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * DLI Czech Basic Course: Dictation Exercises hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * DLI Czech Basic Course: Songs of Czechoslovakia (textbook only) * Beginning Level Czech for Americans hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * Intermediate Czech by Grażyna Kabat et al. hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * Short Course in Czech Pronunciation (audio only) * Czech Grammar by Janda and Townsend * A Grammar of Czech as a Foreign Language by Tahal * Reading Authentic Czech I by Privorotsky hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * Reading Authentic Czech II by Privorotsky hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * E.I.L. Czech: An Audiolingual Course Vol. 1 by Kucekova hosted at ERIC (textbook only) * Extensive collection of handouts on Czech grammar hosted by Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan * Pravidla českého pravopisu (Orthographic Manual of Czech) * Internetová jazyková příručka (Online linguistic handbook - monolingual but excellent as it is both a reference dictionary showing inflection of any word entered by the user and a reference manual of Czech grammar and orthography) * Czech in Czech Republic from Langmedia at the Five Colleges Center for the Study of World Languages * Duolingo offers a course in Czech. Literature and authentic texts * Online resources for Czech literature including literary works in English translation * Online Czech reader of texts from the 18th and 19th centuries * Reader with selected works from Czech literature including exercises and audio hosted by Brown University Information on dialects * This page has an interesting link to Czech dialects and other Slavonic languages from a Czech perspective: * For those who want some information on the Moravian Czech dialects, here are two sites (for these, it's better if you can understand some Czech): * Hantec this concentrates on the dialect spoken in Brno - on the left there is a link 'slovník hantecu' which means 'dictionary of Hantec (dialect)') * Po naszymu (this is a nice site on the Lachian dialect spoken in Northeastern Moravia. It's especially interesting if you also know some Polish and/or Slovak.) Bookstores that carry Czech inventory or have material of interest for students of Czech * Barvič a Novotný * Bay Foreign Language Books Ltd. * Bohemia Books USA * Czech Books * jn Czech Bookstore * Kosmas.cz * Neoluxor * Schoenhof's Institutions or tutors offering lessons in Czech * List of tutors, private firms or schools offering Czech lessons to foreigners * Intensive courses in Czech for foreigners[ offered at Charles University in Prague. * Department of Czech for Foreigners at Masaryk University in Brno. * Courses in Czech for foreigners offered at Palacký University in Olomouc * Private courses in Czech offered at Education Center of Ostrava * Czech Language Groups at Meetup.com (these are groups where one can meet expatriate Czechs at meetings or events. So far almost all active groups are found in Canada or the USA but there is also a group in London) Downloadable/streamed media * List of radio stations in Czech Republic and website of Czech Television which have content available as streams. References Category:Slavic Languages Category:Languages Category:Latin script